UWB Takes Another Hit as WiMedia Shuts Down

The main standards group overseeing the ultrawideband standard, the WiMedia Alliance, said it would shut down on Monday.
The standards group’s actitivities will instead be handed off to the Bluetooth SIG, the Wireless USB Promoter Group and the USB Implementer’s Forum.
It’s hard not to see this as not a blow to the UWB technology, but WiMedia members told EETimes that there was simply too much overlap between the standards bodies, and that multiple certifications and travel to similar meetings strained travel budgets. The move comes as the wireless technology has reached a state of maturity, and it is now time to, “start simplifying how the industry was structured,” said Stephen Wood, the president of the WiMedia Alliance, in an interview with EETimes.

In the last six months, TZero, WiQuest and Focus Enhancements all closed down, while Artimi merged with Staccato. The two major remaining start-ups, Alereon and Staccato, will license WiMedia IPR from the Bluetooth SIG, according to Rethink Research.
Rethink, moreover, takes a rather pessimistic view of UWB as a whole.
Although UWB promises much – in ideal conditions it can deliver speeds up to 600Mbps at very low power over short distances – it has rarely achieved those conditions,” Rethink wrote in an emailed newsletter sent Tuesday. “Its capabilities have been ringfenced by regulatory restrictions, industry in-fighting, and the rapid progress of high speed Wi-Fi in key UWB target markets such as the digital home. Some argue that the choice of an OFDM basis for the WiMedia platform, which was sparked off by Intel and Texas Instruments, was also a mistake in performance terms. To date, WiMedia demonstrations have fallen well short of their targets, delivering slower speeds than many Wi-Fi networks, while more successful implementations have come from small independent players such as Pulse~Link, which have not yet achieved the major industry partners necessary to infiltrate the consumer electronics mainstream.”